Chef Takashi Yagihashi (Takashi) long had his eye on an industrial-chic space in Chicago’s electric River North area. But the room — with its exposed mechanicals, concrete floors and block walls — just wasn’t quite right for the eponymous, upscale restaurant he ultimately brought to Bucktown in 2007.

Then Takashi decided to open Slurping Turtle, a casual Japanese izakaya-style eatery, and the River North space was perfect. Well, sort of.

Designer Francois Geneve was brought in to customize the tall and narrow room (a former Calvin Klein store) to suit the chef’s needs.

“We struggled for several months with the layout,” Geneve says. On a limited budget, he worked to give Takashi ample kitchen space while fitting in a sufficient number of seats. They wound up with 86, which have been filled almost constantly since Slurping Turtle opened in late November.

“We pretty much had a blank slate to create anything we wanted,” Geneve says. Constrained by his budget, however, Geneve worked with what he was given, and “selected to do a rather industrial look.”

“I worked with this instead of trying to cover it up.”

He also sectioned the room into three distinct zones. Bookending the space are an open kitchen in back and a multi-level front dining area. The center section houses a geometric bar, three end-to-end communal dining tables, and a row of elevated booths.

Geneve and Takashi vacillated between “doing something trendy or something traditional.” And they came up with something “in between,” Geneve says.

“We didn’t want it to be overly Asian, but we wanted it have a Japanese flavor,” says Geneve. Izakayas — Japanese tapas bars — traditionally offer communal and private dining spaces. And Geneve’s design includes both. His private “bento box” structures are wittily set in a two-tiered grid against the restaurant’s expansive glass front window. The mezzanine level of wood boxes prevents the space, with its soaring 16-foot ceiling, from becoming too cavernous.

“I decided to call it ‘The Hollywood Squares’ set,” Geneve says. It’s particularly fun to look at the eatery from the street; the designer intentionally wanted passersby to wonder, “What are those people doing in those boxes?”

The boxes (as well as the dining-room booths) hold comfy love seats that Geneve upholstered in a neutral nylon mesh. The fabric “has a little bit of texture and pattern that is reminiscent of the wood’s texture,” Geneve says.

“I did not want to disrupt the idea of the box.”

The designer aimed to offset “the unfinished nature of the walls, ceiling and floor,” and prevent the eatery from appearing “too industrial.” So he specified white Corian for the table and bar tops; white oak for elements such as booth backs, table bases and other millwork; and white back and seat coverings for the mod metal bar stools and chairs.

A few swathes of red — behind the bar and across the kitchen, for example — were also used “to add a little bit of warmth and life.”

And the red serves as a visual cue for diners. “Where the activity is going to take place, it’s color-coordinated,” the designer says.

(Geneve had originally designed red box-like structures to run up the walls and across the ceiling to further delineate Slurping Turtle’s three distinct areas. But the structures were never built. The red painted stripes where the boxes would have stood remain, and serve as a decorative feature.)

In order to add greater warmth and another dash of Asian flavor, the designer placed amber metal drum lights in the room’s center. And to break up the large stretch of the main dining room’s block wall, Geneve affixed a beguiling blow-up childhood photo of Takashi’s father and aunt in traditional Japanese garb to the wall.

The sepia-tinted vintage portrait provides “a nice balance to the [restaurant’s] modern, contemporary elements,” Geneve says.

“It was what the space needed to give it a human touch.”